Following up on my earlier post about ignorant judges, I think it would be useful to have specialized judges who know more than just the law. I believe there are special judges for things like contract law, but we probably need something similar for technology. I can't find many resources on the web about specialized judges, probably because they vary from state to state, but I'd be interested if anyone can provide some information.
Unfortunately, I don't think the problem can be as easily solved by blogging as was the ignorant journalist situation. Amateur journalism by experts is great and contributes enormously to our civilization, but I doubt amateur judges would be as effective.
One idea I've got is that there could be a panel of amateur judges. Rather than voting to resolve an issue, as one might expect from a panel, each judge would write a decision and then the litigants could then pick from those decisions and decide together which one to adopt.
"I think it would be useful to have specialized judges who know more than just the law."
I would happily settle for judges who actually knew the law. As it is, the most brilliant of men could spend their lives studying the law, and still die knowing less than 1% of it. And considering the low salaries that judges receive, it’s rare for the most brilliant of men to choose to work as judges. In many states, many lower-tier judges are not even lawyers. The public gets the quality of judiciary it’s willing to pay for.
Some judges do specialize, but only in areas of law, not in other areas such as technology. The federal judiciary includes, for example, specialized courts for tax law and bankruptcy law.
But specialization doesn't increase efficiency as much as you might think, because legal disputes often involve an array of legal issues spanning several areas, especially at the trial level. The highly publicized cases skew public perception, because the issues in a case generally narrow as it works its way through appeals. But at the trial level there's no telling what kind of legal question a judge might be forced to answer, as the story about Judge Runyon illustrates.
"One idea I've got is that there could be a panel of amateur judges. Rather than voting to resolve an issue, as one might expect from a panel, each judge would write a decision and then the litigants could then pick from those decisions and decide together which one to adopt."
If the litigants could "decide together" on anything, then they wouldn't be in court in the first place. In most disputes, the people directly involved resolve things among themselves. In a few cases they hire lawyers, and in most of those situations the lawyers resolve the dispute without litigation. Of the few remaining disputes that actually reach litigation, most of those are settled during discovery, long a trial judge actually decides anything. (The big exceptions here involve types of matters that must be decided by a judge, such as bankruptcy, divorce, or guardianship.)
By the time a dispute actually reaches a judge, then either:
1) at least one of the parties is irrational, probably through greed or hatred, or
2) the dispute involves some genuinely difficult question of law or fact on which the parties can't agree.
In setting up business entities, I often must press the owners for a formal decisionmaking process. My clients often respond with: "We'll just talk it over and come to a consensus." This misses the whole point. When people can just agree on stuff, then we don't need law. We have formal decisionmaking procedures---from litigation to corporate bylaws to the rules of the US Senate---to handle the many situations in which people cannot agree.
Law is the reflection of human imperfections. If we were angels, then we wouldn't need law. I suspect that much of the visceral dislike of lawyers is that we remind people of their inherent moral imperfection.
It's like meeting a mortician, or a guy who works at a sewage treatment plant. We all know that some system must handle dead human bodies, and that something must happen when we flush the toilet---but we prefer not to think about the details. We also know that some people are dishonest, greedy, hateful, or unreasonably stubborn---and that some system must exist to identify those people and force them to behave. But most of us prefer not to think too hard about that system, because doing so reminds us that we are not angels, that the same evil lurks within us all. It's much easier, instead, to imagine that law somehow creates evil, rather than managing the evil that human nature creates.
"then the litigants could then pick from those decisions and decide together which one to adopt"
HAHAHAHAHA.
Lots and lots of legal issues are binary, or else the litigants have irreconciliable views, which is almost always why they are in court instead of having already settled their differences among themselves.